THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 9, 1996 TAG: 9601090319
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: THE BLIZZARD OF '96
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
A handful of editors were slouched in The Virginian-Pilot's newsroom Sunday, listening to a reporter describe a series of mysterious underground explosions that had just erupted a few blocks away.
``The first one left a crater,'' the reporter was saying, ``and then smoke started pouring out of the street, and then a couple of terrific bangs, and then this pillar of flame, and then -''
And then the lights went out.
So started an all-night scramble to produce, without electricity, a newspaper almost entirely reliant on it.
Without power, computers and telephones immediately shut down. The paper's wire-service feeds vanished. Lines through which editors transmit the newspaper's pages to the presses were worthless.
While the paper's Virginia Beach production plant was unaffected, there seemed no way to produce anything for the presses to print.
Despite wars, hurricanes and wicked northeasters, The Virginian-Pilot had not, in the memory of anyone working for the company, ever suspended publication. But the outage that blacked out downtown Norfolk beginning at 2:40 p.m. Sunday put the paper's resourcefulness to an extreme test.
The abbreviated version of the Pilot that appeared Monday was a testament to a little luck and a lot of ingenuity.
After stumbling around in the dark for a few minutes, the newsroom staff managed to locate two charged-up cellular phones, with which they summoned the paper's editors and Publisher Bruce Bradley.
With the exception of the top editor and the head of the paper's computer system - both out of town - all had converged by late afternoon on the Brambleton Avenue office. There, by flashlight, they hatched a plan to produce a paper from the Virginia Beach bureau, located at Pembroke.
That meant lugging computers and photo equipment down pitch-black stairwells and driving them across town on glass-slick roads.
It also meant possibly foregoing some Pilot staples - out-of-town stories supplied by the Associated Press and other wire services.
``We concluded that we did not know whether we would have access to the wire or not,'' Bradley said Monday, ``which dictated a significantly smaller paper.''
The absence of wires would particularly hammer the sports pages, which relied on them for coverage of Sunday's NFL playoff games. That raised a strategy often discussed but never tried.
``For years we'd talked about worst-case scenarios, talked about producing the paper, if we had to, in Newport News or Richmond,'' said Deputy Managing Editor I. Nelson Brown. ``We'd never come close to having it happen.''
The editors decided to produce two eight-page sections. The first would contain news, perhaps all of it locally generated, along with the editorial and op-ed pages, which are produced in advance. The second section would contain sports produced with the help of the Daily Press in Newport News, and five already-finished pages of The Daily Break.
News reporters headed for Virginia Beach, where they wrote their stories on one computer system and editors designed pages on another, meaning that each story had to be retyped into the second system.
While two dozen people labored to finish the eight-page front section, another five Pilot staffers made their way to the Daily Press. There, with the help of four Daily Press editors who pitched in on their days off, they cranked out three sports pages.
A computer connection to the printing plant enabled editors at the Beach to transmit completed pages to the presses. The sports editors in Newport News, on the other hand, had to drive copies of their completed pages back to South Hampton Roads - a prospect almost erased by road closures and increasingly icy conditions.
They made it, but not before nervous editors in Virginia Beach had almost finished preparing three backup pages.
When finished, the two sections were wrapped around previously printed classified ads and Business Weekly sections.
The night's final challenge might have been its toughest: The circulation staff had to get the completed paper to readers' doors on treacherous roads. One truck went into a ditch, but most papers were delivered on time.
Power was restored to the main offices Monday afternoon.
``I didn't think you could do what we did,'' Brown said. ``With hurricanes you have warnings, so you prepare a disaster plan with two or three scenarios. But this hit us cold. We had to prepare a disaster plan as we went along.''
Bradley and several editors said they had no doubt a paper would get out, despite the technological hurdles placed before them.
``It did seem like an Indiana Jones movie, because every time you turned there was something else going wrong,'' Bradley said. ``I just have an enormous sense of pride in the people who worked so hard to get that paper out Monday morning.''
KEYWORDS: BLACKOUT ELECTRICITY WINTER STORM BLIZZARD by CNB